This blog is the story of our experience building a Ryan Homes Milan. We're building a Milan because it fits our space requirements and offers the features we are looking for in a new home at a price we are comfortable with. This new construction story will include the good, the bad, and the ugliness of building with Ryan Homes. I promise to be as transparent as I can in order to help people who are potentially new home builders themselves.

Friday, June 30, 2017

So it's been just over a year that we've been in our new Milan and overall we're still happy with it. But that's not to say we haven't had our struggles. During the past year, we've had issues ranging from improper lot grading/water drainage to nail pops. I decided to write up a sort of "one year review" on Ryan Homes in the way that our issues were handled. I'm breaking this into two sections. First, the warranty - what it is and what it covers. Second, our issues - what they were and how they were resolved. In this section I've bolded and underlined the main points that others should be aware of (to make reading easier). On my next blog post I will give my review on NVR customer service itself, so keep checking back for that!

10 Year

Vendor Based (non-Ryan Homes)

So this is where that extra 5 years of warranty you got with that level 2 upgraded carpet comes into play. Many items in your home's construction actually still carry a warranty after the 1 or 2 year marks, even though Ryan Homes will no longer service them. The process to execute such a warranty would be that you would be responsible for contacting the vendor that produced and/or installed the faulty material/equipment. This shouldn't be too hard as Ryan Homes is REQUIRED (by law) to provide point of contact information for all vendors who produced anything or installed anything used in your home. If you're missing that information - call Ryan Homes customer service hotline.

Secondly, follow a system when dealing with warranties. Because chances are you don't know exactly what carries a vendor warranty and for how long. Here's an easy way to never have to worry about keeping track of any of that. First, call Ryan Homes customer service line and ask for the defective thing to be fixed. They will most likely tell you "no". But then ask them if it's under vendor warranty. They might dodge this question or answer it. Either way, the important thing is to ask for the vendor warranty contact information. If they give it to you, call the vendor and put in a warranty request with them. IF THEY DON'T GIVE IT TO YOU... tell them they are violating law by not having that information and ask to speak to a regional manager and tell them since you don't know who to call because of they're incompetence, that you expect RYAN HOMES TO FIX IT.

Nearly everything in your home should be under SOME kind of vendor warranty... DON'T ASSUME YOU HAVE TO PAY OUT OF POCKET RIGHT AWAY.

Our Issues

We're thankful there weren't too many. Our PM actually built us a GREAT HOME for which we are thankful. Here's a list of what we did experience though (in a somewhat chronological order):

Creaking floors in the first floor living room where the carpet meets the hardwood in the kitchen - they attempted to resolve but only made it worse, so we bit the bullet on this one because we didn't want them pulling carpet and subflooring up anymore than they already had, possibly making an even worse problem.

They forgot to install some crown molding - easily fixed!

Loose stair boards - easily fixed!

A basement light not wired correctly and therefore not working - easily fixed!

One of our in-ceiling speakers not wired correctly and therefore not working - easily fixed!

One of our network/data ports on our wall mount TV pre-wire not wired correctly and therefore not working - took half a day to fix this because the Guardian tech they sent out kept telling me the connection test was fine... but he was running a voltage test instead of the test where they make sure all the right wires are terminating into the right receptacles on the data port (yes it is very specific wiring). After couple hours I made him run that test and BOOM... the tool reported a MISWIRE. SHOCKER.

Front and garage doors not latching properly - easily fixed!

Caulk was settling and revealing unsightly seams in some of the molding - fixed with... you guessed it.. MORE CAULK (and now at the time of writing this that caulk has since settled and there is yet again an unsightly problem).

Sump pump was pumping water out to the side yard which wasn't draining away properly and was pooling - fixed... they actually installed an underground drain pipe and connected it to my sump so now all the sump water gets pumped into this pipe which empties behind our lot into a creek bed.

Minor nail pops... but lots of them, even in the ceiling - though easily fixed during our one year service visit.

Improper lot grading... we had standing water on the side of the house, and a canyon in the back where the draining water had literally cut through the yard so fast that it canyonized it. This was made worse by the fact that our back yard was not seeded properly. The yard was maybe 40% covered by grass. It looked more like a desert scene. They had to come back and re-grade our lot twice, but the drainage is better now. They laid sod in the back where water drains through to help prevent canyoning, which seems to be effective. However, after they re-graded, they re-seeded the yard and it still looks TERRIBLE. The company that Ryan Homes uses in our area, Green Pro, is absolutely awful. Their workers take no pride in what they do and you can tell they're minimum-wage, careless, and possibly illegal workers. After being re-graded and seeded TWICE, our back yard still looks like a desert scene.

Going off of the above, the quality of landscaping has been our biggest problem BY FAR... Green Pro installed sod in the front yard that had been sitting in our street for a whole day in the hot sun, so it was severely dried out once they actually laid it. It took much more watering than it should in order to bring it back to life and sustain it. They did a piss-poor job of seeding/strawing the back yard - the seeding was too sparse and they missed entire areas of grass altogether. As a result, we have patches of grass and mostly dirt in our back yard. We called to have this addressed and a regional manager came to our house to look at the yard. He reluctantly agreed to have it re-seeded, but told us that this was up to Ryan Homes standard because more than 50% of the yard was covered with grass. But Green Pro re-seeded it, which helped only a little. It still looks like a desert one year later and I'm not happy with it at all, but Ryan Homes customer service will not address it now because we're past our one year mark. Even though we've repeatedly complained about it, and it was never even close to being the yard we we're promised when we agreed to build the house. WHAT A SHAM. What else? Oh, Green Pro sucks at installing trees. They installed BOTH trees in our front yard crooked so both trees were leaning and looked terrible. Lucky for us, one died and they replaced it and actually managed to install the replacement tree straight. The other one is still crooked a year later. Green Pro told me, after they installed it, that it would straighten up over the next year. Well it didn't. In fact it got worse. So I called Ryan Homes customer service about it and was told it's not their problem because they don't warranty landscaping. So now we're just stuck with a terrible looking tree in our yard. Yay for us.

In the end, this is what we were left with... what Ryan Homes calls a "starter yard"

Look at this beautiful wasteland you get with your nice, new Ryan Home!!!